"We Don't Do Links": Tom Standage of The Economist Wants to Give His Readers Dunning-Krueger
Hoisted from a Year Ago: "We don't do links.... If you want to get links... go on Twitter.... We've clicked on the links already and we've decided what's interesting, and we've put it in Espresso.... We don’t want to undermine the reassuring impression that if you want to understand Subject X, here’s an Economist article on it--read it and that’s what you need to know..."
No. When I read it, I did not believe it either.
It would seem to me that the last thing the world needs is more cocksure underbriefed morons suffering from the Dunning-Krueger effect who believe that they are up-to-speed on issues about which they in fact know very little.
And the last thing the world needs is news organizations with business models that involve creating more of such morons--via knowingly and deliberately providing its readers with the false 'reassuring impression' that a 600-word Economist article is all someone needs to know.
No, I did not believe it either. But it's there:
: Interviewed by Joseph Lihtenberg: "What we did with Espresso [at The Economist]...
...was instead of doing that in a weekly cadence, we should be doing it in a daily cadence. Espresso is again meant to be the daily desert-island briefing.... What we wanted to be was forward-looking — to give you the feeling of being ahead of the news, ‘this is what’s coming up today, and look out for this.’ Another aspect of it is... that we don’t do links.... If you want to get links you can get them from other people. You can go on Twitter and get as many as you like. But the idea was... you can get to the end of it without worrying that you should’ve clicked on those links in case there was something interesting.... We’ve clicked on the links already and we’ve decided what’s interesting, and we’ve put it in Espresso.
That’s the same that we do in the weekly as well--we’re not big on linking out. And it’s not because we’re luddites, or... don’t want to send traffic.... It’s that we don’t want to undermine the reassuring impression that if you want to understand Subject X, here’s an Economist article on it--read it and that’s what you need to know. And it’s not covered in links that invite you to go elsewhere. We’ll link to background, and we’ll link to things like white papers or scientific papers and stuff like that. The idea of a 600-word science story that explains a paper is that you only need to read the 600-word science story--you don’t actually have to fight your way through the paper. There is a distillation going on there.
That’s a big thing that we’re focusing on. How else can we apply the same values--which is the distillation and the finishability, the trend-spotting and the advocacy--how else can we apply them to new areas? So we have various things that are on the boil...
Now Tom Standage is very smart--which, I think, makes it in some sense worse.
The public sphere is in enough trouble as it is without people deliberately embarking on business models and rhetorical strategies that damage it even more. Whatever the Economist wants to do, it will do it without my subscription revenues or my eyeballs rented out to advertisers. Links to the Economist will be on a tit-for-tat one-for-one basis, for my links needs to be reserved for fellow gift-exchange participants in a merit-of-ideas-based positive-sum attention game.
In fact, if the Economist follows this strategy, I do hope that it fails, for then its readers will off to consult publications that behave better...
